been suggested that he did this in order to make it difficult for any
one else to read the words, which were frequently committed to paper
by the aid of peculiar abbreviations.

Leonardo continued to work in his master's studio till about 1477. On
January 1st of the following year, 1478, he was commissioned to paint
an altar-piece for the Chapel of St. Bernardo in the Palazzo Vecchio,
and he was paid twenty-five florins on account. He, however, never
carried out the work, and after waiting five years the Signoria
transferred the commission to Domenico Ghirlandajo, who also failed to
accomplish the task, which was ultimately, some seven years later,
completed by Filippino Lippi. This panel of the "Madonna Enthroned,
St. Victor, St. John Baptist, St. Bernard, and St. Zenobius," which is
dated February 20, 1485, is now in the Uffizi.

That Leonardo was by this time a facile draughtsman is evidenced by
his vigorous pen-and-ink sketch--now in a private collection in
Paris--of Bernardo Bandini, who in the Pazzi Conspiracy of April 1478
stabbed Giuliano de' Medici to death in the Cathedral at Florence
during High Mass. The drawing is dated December 29, 1479, the date of
Bandini's public execution in Florence.

In that year also, no doubt, was painted the early and, as might be
expected, unfinished "St. Jerome in the Desert," now in the Vatican, the
under-painting being in umber and _terraverte_. Its authenticity is
vouched for not only by the internal evidence of the picture itself, but
also by the similarity of treatment seen in a drawing in the Royal
Library at Windsor. Cardinal Fesch, a princely collector in Rome in the
early part of the nineteenth century, found part of the picture--the
torso--being used as a box-cover in a shop in Rome. He long afterwards